"The County of RADNOR is 90 Miles in Circumference, contains about 310000 Acres, divided into 6 Hundreds in which are 4 Market Towns & only one Radnor ye County Town privileged with sending 1 member to Parliament like ye rest of ye Welsh Boroughs, 52 Parishes & about 3158 Houses. The Air is sharp, the Soil barren & mountainous, abounding in Woods, Rivers & Moors, intermixed with some fruitfull Valleys. Its cheif Commodities are Cheese & Horses." [Emanuel Bowen, Britannia Depicta, 1720]

"RADNORSHIRE, (or Radnor), an inland county of South Wales, lying between 52° 2' and 52° 33' N. lat., and between 2° 57 and 3° 45' W. long. It is bounded on the N. by county Montgomery, on the E. by counties Salop and Hereford, and on the S. and W. by counties Brecon and Cardigan. Its greatest length from E. to W. is 32 miles, and its greatest breadth from N. to S. about 28 miles. The area is 429 square miles, or 272,128 statute acres, of which about one-third is enclosed, and the remainder mountain, common land, bogs, and moorland. Of the enclosed portion only one-fourth is under the plough. The general aspect of this county is mountainous, bleak, and dreary, with the exception of the south-eastern districts, which are comparatively level, and producing good crops of corn. ...More" [Description(s) from The National Gazetteer (1868)]

Census

The UK BMD web site "provides 2556 links to websites that offer on-line transcriptions of UK births, marriages, deaths and censuses. A wide range of other indexes and transcriptions are also available for most counties, these may include parish records, wills, monumental inscriptions etc..."

Carry out initial searches on all censuses 1841-1911 on LDS Family Search - using basic data supplied by Find My Past (subscription site) and all follow up searches are directed there

National Library of Wales An online searchable index of Marriage Bonds and Allegations. It contains details of some 90,000 marriages by licence which took place in Wales between 1616 and 1837. In early 2016 the NLW made changes in its online catalogue and now the only apparent method of finding these bonds is to search the main catalogue

The UK BMD web site "provides 2556 links to websites that offer on-line transcriptions of UK births, marriages, deaths and censuses. A wide range of other indexes and transcriptions are also available for most counties, these may include parish records, wills, monumental inscriptions etc..."

The Act of 1543 established the courts of Great Sessions in Wales, equivalent to the English Assizes, which continued until 1830 when they were abolished. Records for the Great Sessions are held at the National Library of Wales.

Powys Archives hold records pertaining to Radnorshire Quarter Sessions which were established by the same Act although records do not begin until the late seventeenth century. See also their Petty Sessions listing

Kain, R.J.P., Oliver, R.R., Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: History Data Service, UK Data Archive [distributor], 17 May 2001. SN: 4348. Here is a gazetteer/finding aid plus a set of overview maps to accurately identify the position of parishes within the county

A Vision of Britain Through Time. "This site contains information about your home area from the 2001 census -- and from every earlier British census back to 1801. It can present this information both as maps of the whole country and as graphs showing change over time in your area. It truly offers a Vision of Britain through time"

Tallis's Topographical Dictionary of England and Wales, published in 1860 in six vols, editor E. L. Blanchard.
See Welsh Family History Archive for all the excellent county maps (showing the hundreds) and the alphabetical gazetteer
From the preface;
"In the following pages will be found fully described the past history and present aspect of every place of any significance in England and Wales, forming a work of permanent importance to the commercial world, of ready service to the tourist of the day, and of constant interest to the general reader, who may derive from this source a large supply of entertainment, as well as of information for the amusement and instruction of a leisure hour."

Kain, R.J.P., Oliver, R.R., Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: History Data Service, UK Data Archive [distributor], 17 May 2001. SN: 4348. Here is a gazetteer/finding aid plus a set of overview maps to accurately identify the position of parishes within the county

Family Search have an interactive map called "England and Wales Jurisdictions 1851" showing parish (and other) boundaries with optional background maps such as Ordnance Survey. There is also a Search facility, do read the guidance notes to get maximum benefit from this useful resource. See here for further background information to assist in the interpretation of this data

Day Schools in Radnorshire in 1847. This database consists of day schools which existed in 1847 included here within an alphabetical list of parishes
It contains the names and types of day schools listed in the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales published in 1847

The Radnorshire Society - publishes an annual volume of Transactions which contains scholarly articles on local history topics, book reviews, and society notes. It was first published in 1931 and continues. On Welsh Journals Online.

This county is maintained by Gareth Hicks with help and information provided by a number of other volunteers.

We are looking for somebody who can help with the maintenance of this page, which currently has a status of Care and maintenance - A maintainer is correcting broken links, but is not active in updating the section's web pages.
For more information about what helping us entails, look at our help wanted page.
If you would like to consider helping us then please contact Gareth Hicks.